Thanks for this, Peter.
I'm certainly aware about the commas! It is a first draft, and presented as
such, I tend to either put in a lot of 'breath' punctuation or none at all
in early versions, then clean it up later. Now I have no objection to 'like'
in principle, although I suspect that its presence on successive lines needs
to be tweaked.
I thought hard about the 'coarse word' but I think it is right there, for
its very brutality, while the poet is necessary, despite the danger of
preciosity, for the piece itself is very much about the effects on the
'psychological space' necessary for poetry to happen that recent events have
created. The poet (aka poetry) is estranged from the community by the waves
of hate that overtake it, and in the 'desart' (the antique spelling is
deliberate, and intend to further dislocate time, for fables are in and out
of time) the poet is reduced to base drives, to sex and hunger, which are
themselves displaced, for hunger stands up to walk away while sex is looked
for in the androgynous skies.
Many thanks
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
www.paintstuff.20m.com/index.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Howard" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 9:19 PM
Subject: Re: Pome
> On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, david.bircumshaw wrote...
>
> >Quite literally just written this, so any comments are welcome
> >
> You've spelt 'desert' wrong, unless it's intentional, but it doesn't
> seem that sort of poem. There are rather a lot of commas. Highly
> evocative (the poem, not the commas). The angels remind me of the gay
> ones in Philip Pullman. Spiffing last line, with all sorts of levels.
> Does it really, really, have to be a poet? I can see on some levels it
> would be useful, but putting a poet in a poem involves you in dangers of
> being considered self-referential and precious. Personally I'd try to
> get rid of the rather coarse "fucks" which doesn't seem to fit (and in
> any case isn't quite what you mean and reminds me of Legman's discussion
> of 'fool' jokes). Why is silicon thin? Love the rhyme. "Like" is on my
> list of words to be detained indefinitely without trial as constituting
> a threat to poetic security by revealing the presence of incoming images
> in a manner liable to cause a breach of Her Majesty's dockyards.
>
> Best,
> --
> Peter
>
> http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry/
>
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